Our Children’s Academy in Lake Wales is getting a brand-new, $1.2 million campus, and Tucker Paving Inc. has a nice role in the construction.

We’re looking forward to this project for a couple of reasons: One, we’re going to be working alongside colleagues with our sister company, Tucker Construction & Engineering Inc.; and, two, Our Children’s Academy is a very special school.

The charter ESE (exceptional student education) academy “is a place where children with special needs overcome daily challenges and enjoy success in learning and living.”

After more than five years of planning, the new campus for Our Children’s Academy is being built on 7.62 acres at 501 Burns Ave. That’s near High Point Church and not far from the academy’s current campus at 555 Burns Ave.

The groundbreaking ceremony for the new campus was held April 19. With the selection of a modular building for the academy’s main structure, the campus should be ready for the August start of the 2016-17 school year.

Our Children’s Academy currently serves special-needs children from pre-kindergarten through the ninth grade. With recent approval of a new charter, academy officials can move ahead with plans to teach students through the 12th grade.

“My 5-year-old daughter attends Our Children’s Academy and it has made an amazingly wonderful difference in her! She is autistic, and going to this school the last year has turned her into a whole new child and brought her out of her shell!”

We’re thankful for Janet’s post, and the Tucker Paving team is happy for her and her daughter.

For more about Our Children’s Academy, a truly wonderful center for learning, visit the website at www.ourchildrensacademy.org.

Running errands or running to work and back, you might have seen the signs: “Support a Skate Park in Winter Haven.” We’ve seen them, too. While this isn’t the appropriate forum to get into the pros and cons of such a project for local recreation, the simple mention of “skate park” does offer a nice segue to note a recent Tucker Paving project.

It was a skate park, of all things.

Team Tucker successfully partnered with the Tampa office of Cutler Associates, Inc., another construction management and design-build firm, on the construction of the all-new Bro Bowl 2.0 skate park in Tampa. Bro Bowl 2.0 is part of the new $7 million Perry Harvey Sr. Park, located near the city’s downtown area. The new skate park also is a replacement for the historically famous original — but now-demolished — 11-acre Bro Bowl that was built over a Tampa thoroughfare once known as Central Avenue.

Bro Bowl 2.0 is an exact duplicate of the original 1978 Bro Bowl with an additional 12,000-square-foot section of skate park. Laser-mapping technology was used by Team Pain, a company with expertise in skate parks, to capture the layout of the original skateboarding basin for use in Bro Bowl 2.0.

Bro Bowl was the first U.S. skate park to be added to the National Register of Historic Places. That happened in 2013. Park demolition happened last year.

Bro Bowl 2.0 opened to the public with a lot of fanfare — and a lot of stoked skateboarders — on April 16. We at Tucker Paving, Inc., enjoyed working with Cutler Associates on this project, and we’re happy that our work will contribute to the happiness of so many young people for many years to come.

Tucker Paving, Inc., got its start in November 1994 doing mostly above-ground work. It’s easy to guess that it involved constructing driveways, drives, parking lots, roads, and streets, with asphalt, concrete, and a variety of aggregates (rocks and such) as the primary materials.

As the years went by, the doors of opportunity increasingly opened for us to do site excavation and underground work, leading to our status today as a company that offers a wide variety of construction services.

In addition to holding Florida-certified Class A General Contractor licenses, Tucker Paving has a state-certified Underground Utilities Contractor License. This license shows that we meet the competency and other requirements necessary to construct underground water, wastewater, and stormwater systems for public and private customers, as well as water infiltration and exfiltration systems (as in retention ponds). We also meet the standards to do maintenance on existing underground water, sewer, and storm pipes, and systems that fall under the regulations imposed by the Southwest Florida Water Management District (Swiftmud).

More specific than the Underground Utilities Contractor License is the Florida Fire Protection Class V Contractor License, also known as the Fire Line License. Tucker Paving also holds the Fire Line License, allowing us to fabricate, install, inspect, alter, repair, and service the underground piping for water-based fire-protection systems. We don’t install fire-suppression systems inside a building; we basically run the fire lines (water-supply lines) up to a building and let another contractor do the inside work.

In the construction business, it’s good to be licensed in a variety of fields. It’s smart business to be diversified and able to offer several construction services. Diversified is what we are here at Tucker Paving.